Estamos en Medellín

After a long, long bus ride (around 14 hours)—though not as long as the orange truck, thank god—we are now situated in Medellín, which is a large metropolitan city in the Cordillera Central. Once the cocaine mafia headquarters of Colombia, now I guess it’s more known for its clothing production.

On the bus, we were treated to hours of little children trying to usurp each other in the volume and piercingness of their yelling, and I spent a number of hours uncomfortably thinking that my bladder was going to explode. I have this problem, see—when I’m in a situation where there is any kind of pressure, I just cannot get the bladder to function. The pressure, in this case, being that I was in a small bathroom on a Colombian bus (meaning that it is driving extremely fast, passing other cars right and left on windy roads, braking suddenly, and nearly tipping over on sharp turns), and then the toilet seat lid didn’t stay up on it’s own, so you had to try to hold it up with one hand while somehow staying upright in the midst of the movement and jerking of the bus, and then one time I even fell backward into the door and the door swung open, as I stood there with my dick hanging out my pants. Long story short, I ventured into the little smelly dungeon of the bathroom 3 times and attempted to squeeze something out of my burgeoning bladder, and no doing. Fortunately, we stopped somewhere for lunch, where I was able to disembark and calmy urinate in a non-moving and quiet situation.

After that, I remained dehydrated for the rest of the time and just listened to my mp3 player to drown out the screaming children (the mothers never seem to be the slightest bit perturbed) and the movies they elected to put on for the ride. The movies they choose to play are unbelievable. On our bus to Armenia, they had played Dr. Doolittle 3, dubbed into Spanish. On this ride, the first movie of choice was American Pie: Beta House. If you haven’t heard of this movie, it’s not surprising, because it sucks and was never released in theaters for a good reason. What made it especially interesting as a choice for a movie on a bus ride in Colombia was that it wasn’t dubbed into Spanish, and the subtitles in Spanish weren’t formatted for the TV screen, so you couldn’t even read the subtitles. So basically, you have these Colombian familys sitting there watching all these gratiutous sex scenes and boob shots. It was kind of strange, and a little embarrassing, if Beta House is the impression they are getting of America. It was made yet stranger by the fact that the movie kept stopping in mid-play, and then the driver’s assistant would keep re-starting the fucking movie, which begins with an especially gratiutous and disgusting sex scene.

The second movie they chose was Wrong Turn, yet another Hollywood gem, this is a scary movie depicting an in-bred mountain man in West Virginia who murders pretty lost young people. At least this movie was dubbed into Spanish.

Well, that nightmare is over at least, and here we are in Medellín. When we left Cartagena, I had been afraid that I would never have a fresh tropical juice again, and I frantically overloaded on juices the night before we left. I’m happy to report that fresh juice places abound here in the city center, and that in fact it is even easier to find fresh juice here than it was in Cartagena. Phew! I will dutifully report on further activities and impressions of the city as this data comes in. Hasta luego.